Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Today, a young theoretical astrophysicist is more likely to get a tenure-track job by pondering multiverses than by seeking evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is a shame, especially because budding scientists are often at their most imaginative during the early phases of their careers. During this fertile period, they encounter a profe

Very often, what sets an astrophysicist’s detective story in motion is the discovery of an anomaly in experimental or observational data, a piece of evidence that does not follow our expectations and that cannot be explained by what we know. In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule the

This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio—or its width to its height—than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen.

For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful.

The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier

Pascal’s reasoning ran as follows: If it turns out that God doesn’t exist, you have only given up a few pleasures during your lifetime. If God does exist, however, you gain heaven and with it an infinity of rewards. You also avoid the worst of all possible outcomes: an eternity in hell. In much the same way, I would argue, humanity bets its future

As I have mentioned, when ‘Oumuamua sped part of the way around the Sun, its trajectory deviated from what was expected based on the Sun’s gravitational force alone. There was no obvious explanation for why.

What stands in our way of the fair consideration of ‘Oumuamua being of extraterrestrial design isn’t the evidence or the method of its collection or the reasoning behind the hypothesis. What most immediately stands in our way is a reluctance to look past the evidence and reasoning at what should follow. Sometimes the problem lies with the message,

Surrounded by the technological comforts of the twenty-first century, scientists imagine ourselves the descendants of Galileo rather than the descendants of the men (it was entirely men) who muzzled him. But that is an error akin to a scientist cherry-picking data. Our civilization is the product of not just our scientific advances but also those m